LuCiD Seminar: Learning to perspective take in conversation

Dr Kirsten Abbot-Smith (University of Kent) will present the next LuCiD seminar on Learning to perspective-take in conversation. The seminar will take place from 11.00-12.30 on Tuesday 7th March at the University of Liverpool and is open to anyone wishing to attend.

Abstract

To be ‘good at’ pragmatics, an individual must be able to take in account ‘common ground’; that is, the information that they share (and know they share) with a given interlocutor. When following in on a conversation partner’s turn, a speaker might use common ground both to talk about topics she knows the listener is interested in and also to avoid repeating something she has said previously to that partner. When inferring the utterance-level communicative intent underlying ‘there’s no milk’ (as a response to ‘Do you want cereal or toast?’), the listener relies on cultural common ground. Finally when interpreting ‘Can you hand me that pen?’, the listener may need to compute visual common ground to successfully determine referential intent.

In the current talk, I will present developmental data from typical children and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The talk will address the extent to which the same cognitive skills underpin the ability to successfully use common ground during various types of pragmatic language task (discourse, referential communication, and conversational relevance inferencing). I will also discuss whether variable performance between tasks – particularly comprehension and production tapping the same pragmatic domain - might be in part explained by limitations in executive functioning.